Fight the Treatment Industrial Complex

AFSC-Arizona staff are amazing advocates for prisoners - and as such, are true blessings to our communities. Spend time on their site - lots of resources.

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NATIVE RESISTANCE AND THE CARCERAL STATE

Retiring Arizona Prison Watch...

This site was originally started in July 2009 as an independent endeavor to monitor conditions in Arizona's criminal justice system, as well as offer some critical analysis of the prison industrial complex from a prison abolitionist/anarchist's perspective. It was begun in the aftermath of the death of Marcia Powell, a 48 year old AZ state prisoner who was left in an outdoor cage in the desert sun for over four hours while on a 10-minute suicide watch. That was at ASPC-Perryville, in Goodyear, AZ, in May 2009.

Marcia, a seriously mentally ill woman with a meth habit sentenced to the minimum mandatory 27 months in prison for prostitution was already deemed by society as disposable. She was therefore easily ignored by numerous prison officers as she pleaded for water and relief from the sun for four hours. She was ultimately found collapsed in her own feces, with second degree burns on her body, her organs failing, and her body exceeding the 108 degrees the thermometer would record. 16 officers and staff were disciplined for her death, but no one was ever prosecuted for her homicide. Her story is here.

Marcia's death and this blog compelled me to work for the next 5 1/2 years to document and challenge the prison industrial complex in AZ, most specifically as manifested in the Arizona Department of Corrections. I corresponded with over 1,000 prisoners in that time, as well as many of their loved ones, offering all what resources I could find for fighting the AZ DOC themselves - most regarding their health or matters of personal safety.

I also began to work with the survivors of prison violence, as I often heard from the loved ones of the dead, and learned their stories. During that time I memorialized the Ghosts of Jan Brewer - state prisoners under her regime who were lost to neglect, suicide or violence - across the city's sidewalks in large chalk murals. Some of that art is here.

In November 2014 I left Phoenix abruptly to care for my family. By early 2015 I was no longer keeping up this blog site, save occasional posts about a young prisoner in solitary confinement in Arpaio's jail, Jessie B.

I'm deeply grateful to the prisoners who educated, confided in, and encouraged me throughout the years I did this work. My life has been made all the more rich and meaningful by their engagement.

I've linked to some posts about advocating for state prisoner health and safety to the right, as well as other resources for families and friends. If you are in need of additional assistance fighting the prison industrial complex in Arizona - or if you care to offer some aid to the cause - please contact the Phoenix Anarchist Black Cross at PO Box 7241 / Tempe, AZ 85281. collective@phoenixabc.org

The year-end report by the folks at the Death Penalty Information Center
tell more and more Americans what they already know in their hearts to
be true: The death penalty experiment is failing yet again. Undermined
by overzealous prosecutors, a hobby-horse for incurious politicians, too
often taken unseriously by jurors and witnesses, capital punishment in
America has devolved since 1976 into a costly, inaccurate, racially biased, and unseemly proposition.

We clearly can't do it right, and more people are wondering
whether we should continue doing it at all. The facts and figures of
2011 soberly reflect the nation's evolving perceptions of the problems
inherent in the justice system's ultimate punishment. For decades,
"death is different" has been the courtroom mantra of capital cases. But
now, and with increasing clarity, "death is different" is becoming a
discernible trend all across the country. From the DPIC's annual
summary:

New death sentences dropped to 78 in 2011,
representing a dramatic decline from last year's number of 112 and marking the
first time since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 that the country has
produced fewer than 100 death sentences in a single year... Death sentences have declined about 75 percent since 1996,
when 315 individuals were sentenced to death. Executions have also steadily decreased nationwide, with
43 in 2011 and 46 in 2010, representing a 56 percent decline since 1999, when
there were 98. Texas had 13 executions in 2011, and 24 in 2009, representing a
46 percent drop over two years.

There are a lot of reasons for these numbers. Prosecutors are seeking
the death penalty less often because of the prohibitive costs of capital
cases. Judges and jurors have new sentencing options (like life in
prison without parole). Politicians can no longer deny the unsettling
number of wrongful convictions that have sent hundreds of innocent
people to death row over the years. The Supreme Court has sent
unmistakable signals to lower court judges to rein in trial excesses.
And most of the civilized world has turned against the practice.

So have more Americans. Again, from the DPIC's report:

Also this year, the Gallup Poll, which measures the
public's support for the death penalty, but without offering alternatives,
recorded the lowest level of support and the highest level of opposition in
almost 40 years. Only 61 percent supported the death penalty, compared to 80
percent in 1994. Thirty-five percent were opposed, compared to 16 percent in
1994. A more in-depth CNN poll gave respondents a choice between the death
penalty and life without parole for those who commit murder. Fifty percent
chose a life sentence, while 48 percent chose death.

The most ardent supporters of capital punishment -- the ones who want
more, not fewer executions -- look at all these figures and say in
frustration: "Of course the rate of executions is down. This is down
because of soft judges and crafty defense attorneys, and because of the
murderers themselves, who with nothing to lose and nothing better to do
have succeeded in choking the criminal justice system with all their
bogus appeals." It's the same tired argument these folks have made for
years, however, and it's clearly getting less traction -- in courtrooms,
in living rooms, and in state legislatures.

Take the big death penalty stories of 2011. They all buttress the figures offered by the DPIC. For example, there was the dramatic September execution in Georgia of Troy Davis,
which educated millions of people about the fallibility of eyewitness
testimony in criminal cases. Reasonable people have reasonably disagreed
about whether justice was served in the case, but one essential fact
has always jumped out at me. After a trial that included at least 40
witnesses, it took Davis' jury less than two hours to convict him of murder. That's just not good enough.

Nor was the year's ghastly search
by officials in several states for a key ingredient of the drug
cocktail used in lethal injections. These executioners were forced to scramble like thieves
for the drug sodium thiopental when its American manufacturer, Hospira,
stopped making the product. What does it say about a state -- and a
society -- that has to buy its lethal drugs on the sly through a private
middleman, as Nebraska evidently did recently?
It sends the same ghoulish message to the nation -- and to the world --
that the audience at a Republican debate in September sent when it wildly cheered the record rate of executions in Texas.

Following
those cheers, Texas Gov. Rick Perry chillingly told debate moderator
Brian Williams that night that he "never struggled" with the idea that
one of the men executed during his tenure was innocent. This says more
about Perry, of course, than it does about the Texas' capital punishment
regime, which has been repeatedly criticized even
by the conservative United States Supreme Court. It says the gulf
between the cavalier attitude of officials like Perry and the injustice often foisted upon capital convicts is large and growing larger.

If
this gulf widens -- as the DPIC's numbers suggest it has -- then states
like Nebraska and officials like Perry run the risk of becoming
constitutional outliers. The cheers for capital punishment may still be
loud, in other words, but they are coming from fewer judges,
politicians, lawyers, and jurors. Illinois turned away from the death penalty in 2011. For now, Oregon
has, too. There were no death penalties imposed in Maryland, South
Carolina, Missouri, or Indiana in 2011. And California is one ballot
initiative away from finally packing in its wretched excuse of a capital scheme.

The "evolving standard" of decency, the core element of the Supreme Court's Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, clearly "evolved" in 2011 against
the nation's existing capital punishment protocols. Perhaps not enough
to generate any sort of swift movement from the justices in Washington.
But more than enough for men and women of good will to take notice.
Although I can't be certain, I suspect that the Supreme Court is only
two votes short of having a majority that would dramatically alter
existing death penalty rules in favor of capital defendants -- or
perhaps do away with capital punishment all together. Don't say I didn't
warn you.